


Friends Are Like Teabags

by Missy



Category: Baby-Sitters Club - All Media Types, Baby-Sitters Club - Ann M. Martin
Genre: Female Friendship, Friendship, Future Fic, Gen, Growing Up, Humor, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 12:18:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5456282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>...You never know how strong they are until they get into hot water.  Or in the case of most of the girls, warm water.</p><p>(Post-Canon Fifteen Year Reunion Fic)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Friends Are Like Teabags

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lizwontcry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizwontcry/gifts).



Claudia Kishi needs inspiration. Major, big time inspiration. Something that will make the dress she’s been trying to sketch for the past four hours pop into her brain. Something that will actually look great on the rack and not need to be taken back in for alterations and fittings. Something great that won’t make her regret switching majors from illustration art to fashion design fifteen years ago.

She shoves a peanut butter cup between her lips and taps the pad. 

Something great that can happen _any time now!_

The jangling of the front door’s bell causes her to drop her pencil and spin around. “It’s just me!” Stacey says, and Claudia feels a jolt of relief; dealing with a customer is the last thing she wants to do right now.

Stacey still looks every inch the sophisticate, even with frizzy hair and a cup of Starbucks clenched in her polished fist. She’s come equipped with several piles of shiny-looking material and a brochure, both slung over her free arm. 

“How was the Valentino show?” Claudia wonders.

“Bad news,” Stacey says. “Pleather’s back.”

Claudia moans, her face hitting her sketchbook. “NOBODY looks good in pleather!” she cries.

“That’s not entirely true, Claude. Dan Savagewood does,” Stacey grins, wiggling her eyebrows.

“I don’t want to hear about Dan Savagewood.” AKA the current love of Stacey’s loins, a youtuber/slash comic book artist/slash hand model, whom she’s been seeing on and off for the past five years. 

“Whatever, I know he’s not ~Alan Grey but he’s pretty hot.” Claudia happens to be happy with her almost-ten-year relationship and just sighs at her friend’s attempt at a friendly jab. Stacey flops down next to Claudia at their work bench. “And now I’m going to make him some super tight pleather pants.”

Claudia groans. “Stace. This is Connecticut.” She gestures toward their surroundings, the tiny fashion shop located in astute but hopelessly fashion-backward Hartford. In the last month she’d made three couture pieces for Stacey’s New York friends…but a whole lot more prom and dance dresses for dignified, bourgeois society types. Sometimes she swears they should just sell off-the-rack stuff and give up on the design business altogether.

“Have we ever cared what Connecticut thinks?” she wonders. Then the shop’s phone rings and she rushes off to fetch it up. “Hello, Kishi and McGill’s, how may I direct your KRISTY?!”

*** 

Kristy Thomas peeks out her back door and double-checks the weather. “No, no, leave all the planning to me! What? Look, just trust me. I promise you guys – you’ll have the best time!” Whatever protests Claudia tries to mount are ignored; Kristy knows exactly where they live and she knows what to do to get them to cooperate. 

This sort of convincing is nothing new to Kristy; she’s been practicing it in her own version of it for years now. Years ago, her teachers loved to tell her that she’d make a great politician someday, but Kristy had followed her heart and ended up playing baseball, first in college, then in the minors. She bashed against the business’ glass wall and had changed directions in the middle of her career, deciding to become an “idea woman” for an advertising agency. 

There she put her natural ability for creation into use, becoming a notably tough-minded pitcher who would boldly challenged her clients to see the bigger picture, to dare and dream for more. That was what had made her the CEO of Big Ideas Enterprises - the end result was a big house in Stamford with a pool, a formal garden, and two border collies.

Oh, and Bart Allen, who sleeps over whenever the Connecticut Condors are playing a home game.

“Trust me guys, it’s going to be amazing! Completely amazing!” She fondly rolls her eyes at the phone, and Stacey’s protests, and goes back to carefully color-coordinating the placemats she’d pre-ordered for the dinner.

*** 

Dawn Schaffer is upside-down when her cell phone buzzes. Trying to struggle her way to the surface of a barrel full of grain proves painful – she scrapes her side as she grabs her chirping cell phone. The ringtone is familiar; a Paris Hilton tune that only she and Stacey would ever dare admit to loving. She answers on the fourth ring. “What’s shaking, Stace?”

“Ahah everything. Has Kristy called you yet?”

“Twice,” Dawn says. “I’m helping her plan the reunion, didn’t she ask you to come?” Dawn is the only one with any semblance of extra time this year; her health food store is running smoothly, doing great business in its brand-new location at the Stonybrook Mall. When she wasn’t busy teaching her fellow health-food addicts how to blend letchen powder into thick shakes she could be found teaching aerobics to seniors and poorly attempting some kind of social life – AKA spending her time arching or protesting, trying to move society along as quickly as possible.

“Why am I always the last person to find out about this stuff? And I thought Mary Anne was supposed to be in charge this year.”

“Mary Ann’s veterinary practice is moving across town and between Logan and the kids she has no time for anything. Besides, it’s a lot of fun to help out, and Kristy’s great at being in charge.”

“Pft, you’re telling me.” There’s no malice in it. “Hey, do you think she’d mind if I brought Dan?”

“Everyone would mind if you brought Dan,” replies Dawn.

*** 

“This Saturday?! Are you sure it has to be then?!” 

“Mary Anne, don’t you dare panic on me.”

The completely confident tone of Kristy’s voice automatically prevents Mary Ann from embarking on an anxiety spiral. She’s got her son throwing animal crackers at the back of her head, an afghan hound sitting on her left foot, a pile of boxes between her knees, and Logan’s not exactly being careful as he pulls the moving van across the median and toward the last exit. “I’m not panicking, I promise I’ll be there – it’s just that so much is happening.”

“So much is always happening! Can’t you give us a little hour? Just a tiny bit of time at the Rosebud Café?”

“Yes! Yes, of course,” she says automatically, batting away the next cracker. “Things are just so…so…you know, right Kristy?”

“I know, but I need you there. It’s been six months…”

“…We just Skyped last night!”

“Skyeping doesn’t count,” Kristy insists. “You can’t show us how cool you’ve gotten unless you’re right here and in the flesh.”

“Me? Show off?” The very idea makes her flesh shrinks, even though Kristy has a good point – and Mary Anne really is proud of her progress. She’d started almost fifteen years ago as a veterinary assistant, slowly but surely building up her own practice and acquiring accreditation. When at last she'd found herself with a working reputation, Doc Culpepper retired and she found herself with a full practice – and a busy husband as well as a small son. She hadn’t quite made it to New York – but Harvard is a comfortable close second.

“I’d consider it a favor,” Kristy teases. “And next week I’ll come down to help you unpack the rest of the office.”

“Okay,” she says. “It’s a deal.”

She hopes she won’t cry, but she probably will.

*** 

“And that,” Mallory says, patting the lectern before her, “is how I thought up the Melody Powers series.”

The array of eyes taking Mallory in widened; small hands conjured up a round of applause. They’re the first crowd of many she’ll meet on this long book tour; the first fleet of young faces she’ll escort off to brighter futures, happier places, through the power of her words.

She’s lucky to be where she is; picked out of a slush pile, providing her publisher with a story about a slip of a girl who lives in a magical fairy world where she and her magical horse were destined to save the downtrodden from an evil wizard. Each of her siblings complained that that villain, an evil enchantress named Valeen, was based on them; Mallory demurs and insists that her creations are totally fictional.

Claudia’s call nearly goes unanswered; she’s exhausted by the time she gets back to her hotel room, and her friends understand when she chooses to communicate with them in two sentence increments. When Kristy calls her twice in less than an hour, though, she knows that someone has either died or something major’s happened. 

The reunion news is not unwelcome but is a complete impossibility for her – she’s in Indiana, for heaven’s sake. 

“I can Skype-show-up,” says Mallory. “Jessie would probably be willing to help.”

Kristy frowns at her and Mallory knows – just knows – how much her friend hates to be put off. “If you don’t come home for Christmas I’m going to fly out there and kidnap you.”

“Don’t say that in front of my bodyguards,” she replies, amusement in her eyes.

 

**** 

“One two three, one two three.” Jessie could teach this class in her sleep, but – good teacher that she is – she never fully checks out on her students. They learn, bit by bit, move by move. In May she’ll graduate them and the next wave of students will graduate from Miss Jessie’s School of Dance. 

She’s proud of her kids – of her adults, too, who’ve mastered the art of dance later in life. She’s constantly aware of how hard it is to acclimate oneself to something so complex when your muscles are stiffer and your knees lock up so easily. 

She’s icing down her sore ankle when Mallory’s call comes through. “You’re asking me to go to Connecticut and hold up an iPad for a few hours?” 

“Don’t you want to see everyone again?”

“I also want to be sure to be there for my recital. It’s a bad time.”

“That’s what I told Kristy.”

“Did she try to burn down New York?”

“No,” Mallory said. “But I know everyone wants to see you. Just check your schedule and then get back to her.”

By the time Kristy barrages her with phone calls, Jessie already knows she’s coming to the reunion.

*** 

Claudia and Stacey arrive at the Café in neon-green tops with bright orange skirts, rainbow-patterned tights and high tops. “The side ponytails are a nice touch,” Kristy says – she’s there first, of course, already holding down a big table at the center of the restaurant.

“Claude’s design,” says Stacey. “The reunion inspired her.”

“The rest of the collection’s big oversized sweatshirts with paint dazzle all over them," Claudia says.

Jessie arrives next, with Mallory in tow, Facetiming away from her office somewhere in Manhattan. “Tell me you’re not eating frozen pizza,” Stacey groans.

“I’m tired and I have no idea who delivers,” Mallory says. “Straw poll: who thinks Melody needs to meet her mom in the next book?”

“Don’t blow your narrative wad so soon,” Kristy says.

“What a pretty mental image,” Jessie cringes.

“What’s pretty?” Mary Anne blusters out, trailing a bunch of gift bags and Logan, tears already glittering in her eyes. “What did I miss?” She’s anxious, rosy-cheeked and enthusiastic all in the same breath, still embarrassed to be even a temporary center of attention.

“Mallory won’t stop talking about her books,” Kristy says.

“If I were Mallory I wouldn’t stop talking about them either,” Stacey says. “Where’s Dawn? I’m starving and Dan and I…”

“I’ll pay you twenty dollars not to talk about Dan,” says Mallory from the phone. “Seriously. Don’t bring him up.”

“You don’t understand,” Stacey huffs. “He’s an ARTIST, and he has needs...”

“An artist who sticks pennies up his nose for spare livestream cash,” Kristy says, as if that’s the final word on the matter. “Does anyone have Dawn’s cell number? I have a proposal to make and she needs to be here…”

As if on cue the blonde tears into the restaurant, still smudged from the anti-fur protest she'd been attending that morning, her pants wrecked with bright red paint. He hair are coated with it too. It's telling that this only earns her a quick once-over from her friends,. “Don’t ask questions,” she says, diving toward the table and hiding behind a menu.

The meal that follows is filled with gentle humor, and a quiet sense of sisterhood. They don’t have all of the easy solutions they had back when they were teenagers – no one else can fix Kristy’s commitment issues or improve Mary Anne’s time management skills or straighten the crooked road of fame upon which Mallory trod - and that’s fine – it’s enough to be there, listening to each other, in the same general space and time.

As for Kristy’s proposal? 

“How do you guys feel about Babysitter’s Club International?” she asks over cake and wine. “We could franchise this idea! Give out safety kits and guides to kids all over the world, make an online database to connect kids with parents looking for sitters in their neighborhood. Just picture it,” she grins, spreading out her palms, trying to force the idea into bloom before the tired eyes of the rational adults who surround her – the adults who were once upon a time teenagers who hung on her every word. “Can you picture it?”

One by one by one, they agree that they can.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed the fic, happy holidays!


End file.
